Join us for a live webcast with senior scientist Paul Doherty to discuss breaking news about the Rosetta Mission!
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission deployed its lander, Philae, to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12. 2014. Philae’s landing site, currently known as Site J, is located on the smaller of the comet’s two ‘lobes’, with a backup site on the larger lobe. The sites were selected just six weeks after Rosetta arrived at the comet on August 6, following its 10-year journey through the Solar System.

The most difficult phase of the Rosetta mission is the final rendezvous with the fast-moving comet. Learn what steps the ESA scientists and engineers are taking to ensure a successful landing for November 2014.

Join Exploratorium scientists Paul Doherty and Isabel Hawkins for a live webcast as they share information about the Rosetta Mission, which is due to be "woken up" on January 20th, 2014. Rosetta is a spacecraft en route to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will make the most detailed study of a comet ever attempted.

At our last After Dark in our current home, the theme was Mars! On display the museum has a full-scale model of the Mars rover Curiosity, which arrived on the red planet Sunday, August 5. At After Dark, we had Martians, robots, and extraterrestrials in the crowd! There were Martian themed lectures, a live webcast, and activities like the Egg Drop, where visitors practiced landing a homemade Rover safely onto the ground. Red skies at night offer fun and delight.

How do you work with a robot millions of miles away to make scientific discoveries on a planet you've never set foot on? How do scientists and engineers begin to "see like a rover"- and what can this tell us about who we are as meaning-making creatures? Find out how, by studying the team behind the rover mission, we learn about more than just the surface of Mars.

What would it be like on Mars? Get a sense of Martian living with Exploratorium scientist Paul Doherty. He'll introduce the capabilities of the new rover and demonstrate what the planet would look, smell, and feel like to someone on the ground. Learn how things would fall, how they'd burn, and the shape a Martian snowflake should take in a snowstorm.

Webcasts made possible through the generosity of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Jim Clark Endowment for Internet Education, the McBean Family Foundation.

Bandwidth and infrastructure support for connectivity to the California Research and Education Network and to other Internet2-connected networks provided by the Corporation for Educational Networks Initiatives in California (CENIC).